I am a really big fan of interactive browser applications. Google Local and Microsoft Live Local are doing amazing things and, together with small companies like ours (http://www.telerik.com/ajax), are changing people perceptions about what can happen in the browser. Nonetheless, after watching this video, everything that's viewed as incredibly "interactive" on the web is a bit bleak compared to what you will see. Speaking about map interactivity, if you go to the middle of the video, you will see how a user interacts with a 3D geographical map. It's not happening on the...

Many folks are bashing VS2005 but there are some really great things the folks at MS have added for us in VS2005. One of my personal favorites is the code snippets mechanism. I personally find this feature to be kind of underestimated and will try to give you some basic knowledge about what code snippets in VS2005 are, how to manage them, how to find new, and of course how to “do it yourself”

By definition code snippets are referred to as “ IntelliSense Code Snippets” – by nature they are reusable, task-oriented blocks of code, encapsulated in a XML file...

I love the smell of AJAX in the morning. Hmm, no more listening to Sodom till the end of the week!!

The last few days have been overwhelming. We have been doing our best to wrap up a the beta release of r.a.d.callback. We are finally done, and the build has gone live. Yes it is true now! Go get it from the beta forum, play with it and get that feedback back to us.

So, what's new and cool in there? My favorite feature is the huge boost that the CallbackPanel got. It is not a dumb container that only knows how to execute JavaScript...

As rumor has it, we have quite a few MCSDs on our team and we like to keep our skills sharp. With the release of .NET 2.0 we anticipated a change in the Microsoft certs. We were anxiously waiting for details about MCSD.NET (2.0?), but alas... Good ole MCSD became "deprecated" and you have to get ready for "The Microsoft Certified Professional Developer: Enterprise Applications Developer" (http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcpd/entapp/).

Wow.. that definitely sounds as if you are getting a pretty good ROI compared to the plain MCSD. You become a "Professional Developer" and you add the magic "Enterprise" word to your credentials. The only problem is how to...

Many a customer has asked us "What, the heck, is XhtmlPage and do I need it to run your components?" It is an oddity in our QuickStart examples application that needs some explanation. Atanas, the creator of the class, has already started that in his "Making ASP.NET XHTML 1.1 compliant" post.

Today I was describing a testing approach on the Extreme Programming mailing list that relied on the fact that our controls render standards compliant XHTML, and you could leverage that to write tests using the XML API in .NET -- XPath is sooo convenient for that. And then it hit me! What...

Perhaps some of you know that Telerik's tools provide great interoperability with the Professional Validation And More ("VAM") package by Peter Blum. Peter has a great set of products that offer much more than the validation controls that come with VS. As part of our collaboration, Peter was kind enough to give us a free license for internal use. It was sitting in our software repository and catching dust up until last week. We had to tackle an issue with validation groups in the back-end application of www.telerik.com - the postback triggered the wrong form on the page which wasn't supposed to...

The other day I had a very strange Visual Studio 2005 experience. I was testing the new design time capabilities of r.a.d.tabstrip and something went extremely wrong. My test environment consists of a WebControlLibrary project (the control itself) and a WebSite with a single aspx page containing nothing but a humble r.a.d.tabstrip. The site has a project reference to the web control library so it gets rebuilt whenever I build the site. So far so good.

Here is the fun part - whenever I rebuilt the site and refreshed the page I received the following error:Ok, i said to myself, it's debugging time. I...

I also share John's belief that the tech skills won't get you the job. At least at telerik they won't. The tech skills are just a prerequisite to get you to an interview. Typically, at the interviews in our company we don't ask a lot of technical questions. We do so only in case we are not 100% certain that what the person has written in his/her resume is true. Once we get past that, we spend most of the time trying to understand the person on the other side...